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Stanford AI Lab News

  • For every application in computer science there are two choices: platforms and standards or incompatibility and fragmentation. So far, the robotics community has leaned toward fragmentation, and the result has been hindered progress. Ken Salisbury, professor of Computer Science and of Surgery, thinks it's about time the robotics community had a platform analagous to the personal computer. Read the full article and watch Ken speak about all that. (Aug 7, 2007)
  • Every worried that humanoid robots lack grace? In a recent article, the Stanford report notes that Professor Oussama Khatib and his students pursue research aimed at making humanoid robots more graceful. As noted in the article, "using this energy-minimization strategy, the robot produces the movements without explicitly computing its trajectories in advance," very much like humans do. This project is the latest in decades of ground-breaking research on compliant motion and control coming out of the Khatib lab. (July 24, 2007)
  • The 2007 SAIL Retreat brought together over 100 students, faculty, and staff. Thanks for a generous donation by the Johnson family, SAIL spent 2 days in Monterey, discussing research in AI, socializing, and learning from real magicians how to do magic in AI. Some initial pictures are available. (May 23, 2007)
  • Lab Director Sebastian Thrun has been elected into the National Academy of Engineering. Within SAIL, Professor Thrun joins professors John McCarthy and Ed Feigenbaum, who were elected in 1987 and 1986, respectively. According to the NAE's Web site, "The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) mission is to promote the technological welfare of the nation by marshaling the knowledge and insights of eminent members of the engineering profession." (Feb 20, 2007)
    Professor Daphne Koller will be program co-chair of the next NIPS conference. The annual Neural Information Processing Conference takes place in Vancouver, BC, and brings together 900+ leading scientists in areas as diverse as neuroscience, AI, cognitive science, statistics, and others. NIPS is largely acknowledged to be the leading conference in machine learning and interdisciplinary AI. As the program co-chair, Prof. Koller will be in charge of compiling the scientific program of the meeting. A year later, in 2008, Prof. Koller will become the general chair of NIPS, and then she will join the board of the NIPS Foundation, which oversees the NIPS conference. (Dec 14, 2006)
  • SAIL welcomes Prof. Gill Bejerano to the Stanford faculty. Dr. Bejerano's research focuses on evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), comparative and functional genomics of extant species, and paleo-genomics (the reconstruction and study of ancestral genomes). In short, his focus is the functional landscape of vertebrate genomes, and in particular that of the Human Genome. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was a postdoc at UC Santa Cruz prior to joining SAIL. We are all very excited to have Dr. Bejerano with us in SAIL. Welcome! (Dec 12, 2006)
  • Alexis Battle, Gal Chechik, and Professor Daphne Koller came in 3rd in the Pittsburgh Brain Activity Interpretation Competition, in a field of 39 contestants. Their entry based on "Temporal and Cross-Subject Probabilistic Models for fMRI Prediction Tasks" did amazingly well. If you run into them in Stanford's hall ways: no need to be afraid. To read your brain, they need special fMRI devices. The Third Place victory earned the Stanford team $2,000 and fame in the scientific community. Yet another victory for probabilistic models. (Oct 18, 2006)
  • SAIL graduate makes fundamental discovery in genetics. As reported by Nature in its most recent issue, SAIL graduate Eran Segal found a code beyond genetics in DNA. The finding is also reported in a recent New York Times article. According to the NYT, "the discovery, if confirmed, could open new insights into the higher order control of the genes, like the critical but still mysterious process by which each type of human cell is allowed to activate the genes it needs but cannot access the genes used by other types of cell." Segal got his Ph.D. in 2004 under Prof. Daphne Koller. (July 25, 2006)
  • Stanford STAIR robot in the New York Times: A recent New York Times article reports on the Stanford AI Robot Project (STAIR), led by Professor Andrew Ng.. If you hear hammering in the middle of a night and run into a new bookshelf, be aware, this is AI at work. Definitely worth reading, and congratulations, Andrew! The article also features a brief history of AI. Notice that Stanford plays quite a prominent role... (July 18, 2006)
  • AI just turned 50. Several Stanford faculty members were among the speakers of a 50 year commemoration of the 1956 Dartmouth Conference, at which SAIL-founder Professor John McCarthy gave our field its name. McCarthy also founded the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL). Celebrate with us the first fifty years of AI! (July 18, 2006)
  • Stanley goes to Washington! The retired Stanford robot is now on display in the National Museum of American History, a Smithsonian Institution. Earlier, Stanley was called Best robot ever by Wired magazine. Visit Stanley on your next trip to the mall! (July 5, 2006)
  • Mitul Saha won the Best Student Paper award at ICRA 2006, the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. He won this prestigious award for his paper on "Motion Planning for Robotic Manipulation of Deformable Linear Objects", by M. Saha and P. Isto. A very big congratulations. ICRA received over 1,600 submissions this year. (May 19, 2006)
  • Konstantin Davydov, Steve Goldman, and Subhash Patel win the final course competition in CS223B Introduction to Computer Vision. To win this competition, students had to write software for predicting the whereabouts of cars in highway traffic. The three winners' software got an almost perfect score, leaving behind 26 other teams and 62 students. The winner received a laptop each, donated by Intel. Congratulations! (March 13, 2006)
  • The lab congratulates Prof. Yoav Shoham to his new book! Combinatorial Auctions, authored by Peter Cramton, Yoav Shoham, and Richard Steinberg, draws on the disciplines of economics, operations research, and computer science. This landmark collection integrates these three perspectives, offering a state-of-the art survey of developments in combinatorial auction theory and practice. Well done. (March 14, 06)
  • Stanford built three of the top ten robots ever! According to a recent evaluation by Wired Magazine, three of Stanford's robots were among the top ten robots ever: Stanley (Number 1), Shakey (Number 5), and the Stanford Cart (Number 10). Wired Magazine polled numerous experts to determine the 50 Best Robots Ever. Check it out! (Dec 29, 2005)

    Check out John Markoff's recent book on the beginnings of SAIL:

  • Professor Richard Fikes to retire. Prof. Fikes announced that he plans on retiring from Stanford at the end of this academic year. He has a long and distinguished record as an innovative leader in the development of techniques for effectively representing and using knowledge in computer systems. He is best known as co-developer of the STRIPS automatic planning system; KIF (Knowledge Interchange Format); the Ontolingua ontology representation language, Web-based ontology development environment and ontology library; Semantic Web technology; and IntelliCorp's KEE system. Prof. Fikes joined Stanford in 1991, and has been a director or co-director of the Knowledge Systems Lab since then. (Nov 22, 2005)
  • We have a new scholarship. A significant fraction of the $2M prize money of the DARPA Grand Challenge has just been allocated to a new graduate fellowship, which will be called the Stanley Fellowship. This means that for the indefinite future, Stanley's success will enable a graduate student in the School of Engineering to study and pursue research. The Stanford Racing Team, who donated the money for this fellowship with matching funds provided by the SoE Venture Fund, feels that if Stanley could do more than just drive, he would enthusiastically support this new fellowship in his own name. Congratulations, Stanley, and congratulations to many generations of fellow graduate students! (Nov 3, 2005)
  • The Stanford Racing Team won the DARPA Grand Challenge. This $2M competition required autonomous robots to traverse a challenging 132-miles long course through the Mojave desert. Congratulations to Mike Montemerlo, David Stavens, Hendrik Dahlkamp, Sebastian Thrun, and the many others involved in building Stanley (including a number of individuals from VW, MDV, and Intel). See this report for more information. (Oct 9, 2005)
  • Francois Conti received a Design Distinction in the Annual Design Review by I.D Magazine, for the design and development of the Omega Haptic Device. This annual competition is considered as America's largest and most prestigious juried design competition since 1954. Says the text explaining the jury's choice: "Like a Formula One car, there's an integrity to the shape, nothing superficial, the design is the function." Congratulations, Francois! (Sept 15, 2005)
  • After five years of hard work, SAIL Director Professor Sebastian Thrun just published his new textbook Probabilistic Robotics. The book describes the fundamentals of programming robots under uncertainty using statistical techniques. Says Thrun "the plan was to finish the book in the Summer of 2000". Earlier this year, Thrun published Principles of Robot Motion : Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations. (Sept 8, 2005)
  • Professor Nils Nilsson has posted his latest book on the Web. How are we to know? is a fictional conversation among three people and Gio, an intelligent robot. No hard reading, but full of insight on how we come to believe things and how we should evaluate beliefs. (Sept 2, 2005)
  • The Office of Naval Research has awarded its 5-year 5 million dollar Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant on Radically New Approaches for Robust Speech-to-Text to a collaboration between Stanford AI Professors Dan Jurafsky and Chris Manning) and researchers from USC and the University of Washington, for a project entitled Human-like Speech Processing. This was the only award made for this MURI topic. The project had its 2 day kickoff meeting Jun 16-17 in Seattle and will last until April 2010. (June 24, 2005)
  • 2005 Stanford AI Lab graduate, Dan Klein, now an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley EECS, was one of the five inaugral recipients of a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship Award. The awards provide $200,000 of unrestricted funding for the most promising new researchers. Klein's research demonstrates the feasibility of unsupervised methods of learning to natural language processing problems such as grammar induction and machine learning. Read the official announcement here. (June 24, 2005)
  • Professor Jean-Claude Latombe has been awarded a 4-year NSF grant entitled "Applications of Probability Measures on the Self-Motion Manifold of Deformable Fragments in Proteins" within the Joint DMS-NIGMS Initiative to Support Research in the Area of Mathematical Biology. This new project is a collaborative effort with the Joint Center of Structural Genomics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (Dr. Henry van den Bedem) and Prof. James Milgram in the Mathematics Department at Stanford, to develop mathematical and computational models for protein fragments of 3 to 20 amino-acids and to study the topology and geometry of their conformational space. (June 10, 2005)
  • Professors Ken Salisbury and Sebastian Thrun and SAIL Ph.D. candidate Sean Walker have been awarded an NSF robotics grant for a project on "Robot Haptics: Probabilistic Methods for Active Perception". The project focuses on the development of probabilistic techniques for object manipulation. (June 10, 2005)
  • The Stanford Racing Team, Stanford's Entry in the DARPA Grand Challenge, has been selected as one of forty-three semi-finalist for this autonomous desert race. The Grand Challenge is an off-road robot competition devised by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to promote research in the area of autonomous vehicles. The challenge consists of building a robot capable of navigating 175 miles through desert terrain in less than 10 hours, with no human intervention. (June 6, 2005)
  • Professor Daphne Koller wins the MacArthur Fellowship Award. The MacArthur Foundation chose her together with 22 other young scientist to receive this highly prestigious award. According to the MacArthur Foundation, Professor Koller is acknowledged for "devising new strategies and algorithms for making decisions in complex systems under uncertain conditions, and applying statistical reasoning to classical problems in artificial intelligence." (Oct 4, 2004)
  • Professor Jean-Claude Latombe spends his Fall Quarter on sabbatical at the National University of Singapore, where he has been appointed the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Visiting Professor. The Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple, which endowed this professorship, is one of the most respected Buddhist temples in Singapore. The name means "God of Mercy." According to Latombe, "the challenges are first to remember the name of this professorship and second to use it in a relaxed way in everyday conversations." (Oct 1, 2004)
  • Chuong (Tom) Do, Michael Brudno and Prof. Serafim Batzoglou won the SGI Best Conference Paper Award at the joint ISMB/ECCB meeting on Computational Biology, for their paper "PROBCONS: Probabilistic Consistency-based Multiple Alignment of Amino Acid Sequences". The ProbCons program alignings protein sequences. Tom, the primary author of this software package, is now a first year PhD student at the AI Lab. Congratulations, Tom, Michael, and Serafim! (Aug 4, 2004)
  • Professor Nils Nilsson wins the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence. This award is given at the IJCAI conference to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality, yielding several substantial results. Professor Nilsson was recognized for his pioneering work in the use of heuristics, representations, and techniques for building AI systems capable of planning and acting in the real world. (July 1, 2003)